Much of your work brings artists into dialogue with big systems: technology, institutions, generational change. What draws you to those intersections?
The attraction lies partly in the belief that institutions should be sites of impactful experimentation rather than mere vessels for the display of art. This is why AIR is such an important initiative, in keeping with Aspen’s history of big systems coming together for new ideas, with a utopian dimension. It is very much at play in Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology, now on view at LUMA Arles, in partnership with the Getty Research Institute. It revisits the seminal initiative started by artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman together with Bell Labs engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer starting in the 1960s. Their manifesto talked about “civilized collaboration between groups unrealistically developing in isolation” and avoiding “the waste of a cultural revolution”. The goal posts keep moving, but that mission remains.
Life As No One Knows It suggests a kind of speculative openness and a rejection of the familiar. What does that phrase spark for you, especially in a curatorial context?
I understand that Sara Imari Walker’s book—which I have yet to read—proposes a wide re-definition of biological life’s origins here on Earth and beyond. Curatorially, that brings me to the spaces where artists can generate truly new forms, often in the framework of discussion with other fields. For example, what Paul Chan will be discussing at AIR, his thinking about AI. Artists have long been fascinated with the origins, from the molecular to the interstellar. As Marinetti said, “There are wings which lie dormant within the flesh of man.” How can they be awakened?
You’ve worked everywhere from Tokyo to Arles to Aspen. Does place still matter when it comes to shaping thought?
While telecommunications allow ideas to circulate globally, place continues to shape thought by offering specific contexts, audiences and histories. This brings to mind EAT’s Telex Q&A, a month‑long telecommunication experiment staged in 1971 for Pontus Hultén’s Utopias and Visions exhibition at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet. The group installed telex terminals in New York, Stockholm, Ahmedabad and Tokyo and invited members of the public to send questions about daily life a decade hence (1981) to the other sites. While they were demonstrating the flattening effect of technology, it was paradoxically highlighting cultural differences and how much we gain by bringing foreign modes of thinking the future together.
You’re introducing a conversation that reframes modernism from within. What excites you about Aria Dean and Courtney J. Martin’s approach, and how do you see their dialogue pushing the conversation forward—across disciplines, and across time?
In keeping with the EAT angle, I’m thinking of this conversation though Aria Dean’s long interest in advanced technologies as an artist, writer and filmmaker as well as Courtney Martin’s work as a curator and role in connection to Robert Rauschenberg’s legacy. More generally, the “Off‑Modernism” dialogue will focus on Dean’s forthcoming performance The Color Scheme, which revolves around a dialogue set in 1923 Berlin between a philosopher and a poet. The latter, at some point, says: “My friends feel, at best, that this is just the art of their fathers and grandfathers, and as such it is lame, conservative. Worse, unthinkingly so.” It’s all about the “unthinkingly”: how do we revisit modernism not from a position of nostalgia or scorn but from a knowing within, acknowledging its exclusions and possibilities?
